WND EXCLUSIVE

Top God-hater's 'unholy crusade'

Author shares memories of 'most hated woman in America'

Published: 06/11/2012 at 9:11 PM

By Michael Thompson

WASHINGTON – William Murray appeared on Gov. Mike Huckabee’s Fox News show “Huckabee” on June 9 to discuss his mother’s Marxist war on Christianity in America, which he documented in his book “My Life Without God.”

“She was the most hated woman in America – a title she took great pleasure in, and I’m talking about Madalyn Murray O’Hare,” said Huckabee, introducing his audience to the legacy of Murray’s late mother.

“O’Hair sued the city of Baltimore demanding the city collect taxes on the tax-exempt Catholic Church and NASA – arguing private prayer should be banned by government employees in space; she challenged the words ‘Under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance and the words ‘In God We Trust’ on the currency,” said Huckabee.

The appearance drove Murray’s book “My Life Without God” into the top 500 books sold for both the print edition and Kindle version at Amazon.com, no small feat for a book that was originally published 30 years ago and was recently re-released by WND Books.

“I was raised in an atheist and Marxist existence, and then I became successful in business and became an atheist libertarian believing that anyone who couldn’t make [it] should starve to death and that I was the center of the universe, which led to near self destruction in my life. Luckily, I got out of this because of God, the person that my mother hated so much,” said Murray.

Huckabee then shared with his audience the statement that Murray’s mother made upon learning that her son had converted to Christianity: “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times … he is beyond human forgiveness.”

“She told me that she wished she had aborted me,” Murray told Huckabee and his millions of viewers.

It was 30 years ago that Murray first “My Life Without God”, his account of growing up as the son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder and president of the group American Atheists. His mother used him as a pawn in a lawsuit that ultimately led to the Supreme Court ruling it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct school prayer.

He now serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that works to aid Christians living in Muslim and communist-controlled nations.

The book, which tells the true story of the people and movement behind the unholy crusade to remove prayer from public schools, instantly became an international bestseller.

Long out of print, the classic is back to commemorate its 30th anniversary. WND Books is making “My Life Without God” available for a whole new generation of Americans to learn the shocking details of how and why school prayer was eliminated.

WND CEO Joseph Farah considers Murray’s book to be one of the most important conservative books ever published and credits it with being one of the stories that helped shaped his worldview.

“Bill Murray’s ‘My Life Without God’ was a seminally important book for me when I first read it in the early 1980s,” Farah said. “I was a young journalist drifting further and further from my left-wing and secular worldview. I was horrified by Bill’s vivid and no-holds-barred description of his early life in the home of his famous atheist mother. It made me realize the importance of functional families and transcendent values. It’s also such a hopeful book because if Bill Murray could overcome that experience and find salvation, indeed any of us can. I put this book up there on my list of conservative classics right next to Whitaker Chambers’ ‘Witness.'”